While Isabelle Huppert has excelled throughout her career in serious films - some of them hard - it should not be forgotten that the actress also has a great comic range, and such is the case with her character inPatricia Mazuy's La Prisonnière de Bordeaux , unveiled at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes. While the French director's previous film, Bowling Saturne, drew on the codes of film noir, this new feature is much wiser.
Isabelle Huppert plays Alma, a wealthy, slightly eccentric middle-class woman living alone in her large house in Bordeaux. While visiting her husband in the visiting room of the prison where he is being held for a hit-and-run accident, she meets Mina, a young mother played by Hafsia Herzi (who spends a lot of time in the shade), who is herself visiting her husband, who is being held in the same prison for a jewelry store robbery. Both women have organized their lives around the absence of their spouses, interspersed with penitentiary appointments where broken families meet, inside and out.
While there's nothing to suggest a budding friendship (one, a former dancer, is delightfully eccentric but ultimately very lonely; the other has filled her life with children and has to make do with a food job to survive in the suburbs of Bordeaux), here they are, embarking on a friendly relationship that's as zany as it is tumultuous. In fact, Patricia Mazuy has the good sense to put these two souls on the same level, which ultimately serve each other: the spinster is happy to welcome a bit of life and noise into her big house, and the young woman finds it to her advantage, saving herself hours of transport to prison.
Although La Prisonnière de Bordeaux reveals class relations through this highly effective pair of actresses, this is not the essence of the film, which is much more about female emancipation and sisterhood: two strong women who reveal themselves through contact with each other, helping each other to free themselves from the past and their husbands - in other words, from male domination.
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